First Fox by Leanne Radojkovich

Author:Leanne Radojkovich [Radojkovich, Leanne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781910139691
Publisher: The Emma Press

March began and still no rain. The edge of the footpath trickled away. The black dog no longer swivelled an eye; he stared into space, wheezing. Cicadas hacked out a few crk-crks around eight o’clock, then gave up. The daughter listened for her father shuffling papers or clicking chess pieces; silence. It was Thursday, so he would have been at chess club. He’d hardly ever been home, she realised. After tea he’d dash out to meetings, catch-ups, romantic rendezvous. He hated being cooped up.

The next afternoon, clouds rolled overhead. Wind rushed through trees as the daughter walked home. Flocks of leaves burst into the air then danced across the ground. The black dog raced circles around the lawn, pouncing on the leaves and squealing.

When the daughter opened the door, the wind blew papers off the sideboard. She dropped her shopping bags on the table, knocking over a vase and sending up a plume of glass sparks. Her too-big skirt flapped around her ankles and, somehow, she got caught in the folds, lost her balance and fell. Another gust sped past. Her bedroom door slammed and a picture fell onto the chess set, scattering pieces across the room.

The tense part of the daughter stirred. She swept the china and bric-a-brac off the sideboard. Her father’s five pairs of hobby glasses shattered on the floor; his collection of miniature books tumbled into corners. She knelt amongst the pens and papers and found a peg to pin her waistband tighter.

She went into her father’s bedroom and stripped off the bedding, then pushed it out of the window in bundles. Out went his clothes, his shirts catching on the mandarin tree. Their sleeves filled with air and shimmied. His shoes rolled down the path and disappeared around the corner. She opened the front door and pushed the bedside table down the steps. Pills and underwear fell onto the path; love letters flittered into the hedge.

The dressing table was heavier, beyond her strength normally, but she was ‘charged like a bull’, as he used to say. She emptied the drawers then hauled the carcass across the carpet. It went down the steps in a cartwheel just as the first spits of rain pinged the roof.

The daughter went into the kitchen and made cheese and tomato sandwiches. She stood at the bench chewing slowly as the rain settled into an even drumming. She pulled out the sewing machine with the Bentwood case, which her mother had brought from the old country. The almost-finished ball dress fell into her hands, giving her a jolt. She laid it flat along the table as Mama would have done, smoothing the silk and touching the pearl-topped pins Mama had used to close the hem. On the whole, the dress reminded her of the paper clothes with foldback tabs she’d fastened onto dolls long ago.

She popped a spool of thread on top of the machine and wound it around the bobbin, then took off her skirt, pulled it inside out and pinned a new seam three centimetres in from the original.

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